The Moon and the Sea
by StillAliveDoingScience
Summary: A world outside of Aperture is incomprehensible to those who have never experienced it. Many months after Portal II, Chell finds she is unable to fully heal from her past traumas—but all the medicine she needs is a hand to hold and someone to trust. Chell/Rattmann, separate universe from Half-Life.


I live with him, I hear his voice,

I stand alive to-day

To witness to the certainity

Of immortality

Taught me by Time,—the lower way,

Conviction every day,—

That life like this is endless,

Be judgement what it may

—_I live with him, I see his face,_ by Emily Dickinson.

* * *

Chell was sitting in a quiet room, alone.

The window in front of her was wide and edged with brass window panes that were reflecting the setting sun. Distantly, dark plumes of cloud were gathering and a wall of shrouded mist fell from their bottoms into the sea. She squinted out at the sight, seated at a low desk, one filled with stacks of paper, jars of pens, and an odd contraption that could have been an old-fashioned type writer. A radio was perched on the windowsill, reminiscent of harder, darker times with its green-and-grey pattern and lighted digital clock.

A bittersweet melody played. _"Exile… It takes your mind, again_…"

She stretched, yawning, her exhausted eyes resting on the radio for only the smallest moment. It had been a long day. An average one, she had to admit, but these days, even _normal_ seemed like a marathon. Chell raised her right hand up to her ponytail and have it a tug. Her hair fell down around her shoulders and she mussed it, enjoying the feeling. It was almost time for a cut.

These days, her brain always felt water-logged, her feet always hurt and her back ached constantly when the weather changed even a minuscule amount. She panicked at simple things, like the slight movement of a shadow in her peripheral vision, and any gust of wind in the middle of the night she mistook for the rushing sound of the Laboratories' elevators. The gurgle of the pipes was frightening, reminding her of the air ducts deep in that forsaken place, and she cringed whenever she heard loud announcements over the PA at her school. To top it all off, she had not been able to convince herself to throw away her long fall boots, and the old Aperture jumpsuit (which was still as signed as ever) hung limply in the closet, serving as constant reminders of her past.

_ "It takes your mind, again…"_

She couldn't throw them away. Not when there was the smallest chance she could be taken…

But things had changed. Things had _changed, _and she was never going back. She tried to engrave the notion in her mind. Things had changed, but sometimes Chell didn't know if it was for better or worse. The paranoia could be devastating. Sometimes she could hardly breathe. It hadn't really set in until everything had been unpacked into the tiny apartment she shared with Mr. Rattmann. 'Everything' had only included what was on her back, of course, but it was the idea of actually calling somewhere 'home' that had frightened her at first.

_"You've got sucker's luck…_"

She had thought that once she had gotten used to having a place of her own the paranoid feelings would go away. She was wrong—it was so hard to step outside the door and she couldn't sleep without triple-checking the locks. Once she did finally fall asleep, she was plagued by constant nightmares of terrible memories, of things part of her wished she could forever forget. She_ couldn't _forget—but maybe it was for the best that she didn't. It kept her alert. It kept her awake and aware of the extreme dangers and hardness the world still possessed.

_ "Have you given up?"_

The few last rays of light penetrated the window and lit the dreary walls of the small living space. These walls were mostly covered by tattered, makeshift drawings of many things—her face, her new world, a cube emblazoned with a pink heart on each side. One quality she shared with her roommate was that they both could not stand the sight of bare, white walls. Chell stared down at the ocean, her heavy head resting on the palm of her hand, her chin sliding in her exhaustion.

The radio continued to play the soft tune, and she let it wash over her like the waves outside, beating against the crumbling shore. The rhythm made her feel weak, small; she wasn't sure if she liked it or not. She bit her nails, which were chipped and _clean_ for once, and her hair smelled of cheap shampoo. That was one thing she'd always be grateful for, after the long, drawn-out experiences that seemed years ago, rather than mere months—bathing.

_ "Does it feel like a trial…"_

Doug often complained that she took too long in the bathroom. Chell savoured every minute she was allowed to soak in the hottest water her skin could stand. It soothed her aching, tired body and reinvigorated her mind. Mostly, she liked it because she had fewer nightmares after soaking in the sweet-smelling suds.

_"Does it trouble your mind the way you trouble mine?"_

Below her, about two storeys down, there was a road jam-packed with what must be the evening traffic jam. Beside the motorway were the rocky slopes of the beach, a large amount of loose pebbles resting at the very edge of the churning waters. They were painted pale blue in the fading light, still rimmed with gold from the weak reflection of the setting sun. The sandy portion of the beach was a little ways away, close enough that Chell could take a stroll down to it if she had the energy, but at the moment it felt like a terrific fight just to stay awake. Besides, it looked like it was going to rain.

She found it was somewhat soothing, the ocean. It was nearly as spectacular as she had imagined—and with that revelation came a sudden grief about how Wheatley would not ever be able to witness it as closely as she could.

_"Exile…_ _It takes your mind, again…"_

Yes, he had been exiled. She would not see him again, she would not have to worry about him berating her or trying to kill her. It was all over, and she should have felt glad that he was gone. She should have been glad to put her past behind her, to forget the hurt he had caused her. She shouldn't have ever wanted to see his stupid face again.

_"Exile…_ _It takes your mind, again…"_

But she did wonder something. She wondered if he, too, wanted to make it right between them. Was he sorry? Could he be? No—he would never understand the outcomes of his actions or his utter selfishness. It was true, but Chell still craved his forgiveness nonetheless and wanted to forget—perhaps doing so would fix the hurt she felt within herself. The never-ending sense of having survived when she wasn't supposed to was jarring and painful, and it kept her awake through the night. _She wasn't supposed to survive. _Some unknown element had aided her, like a fountain of immortality. Whenever she glimpsed the pale moon through her ragged curtains, all she could think of was how she should have been exiled, too. She should have died. Her frozen body should have accompanied the core's unceasing lunar orbit.

_"Oh, you meant so much…"_

She had told Doug about this unorthodox sensation. She had told him that sometimes she wished she had perished in Aperture, because the world here felt so _wrong. _She didn't belong. Doug had consoled her as best he could and had told her about how he felt much of the same. He had done so much for her, and she was so grateful. He, a stranger (or so she had guessed, at first) had helped her overcome a tremendous amount of fear and unease. She could communicate, now. She could write her story down if she had to.

_"Have you given up…"_

It was thanks to Doug that Chell had been attending classes a short walk away from their apartment. She was learning how to read and write properly at a school for foreigners and uneducated adults who wanted to give English a try. Because of her quick progression, they'd even promised to teach her something called _sign language_ once she was ready. She was also seeing a counsellor. She wasn't sure if she liked it yet, but Doug had insisted upon it since he was seeing one himself to help manage his disease, so she had just shrugged and agreed to it because she didn't feel like arguing.

_ "Does it feel like a trial? Does it trouble your mind the way you trouble mine?"_

The schooling wasn't hard, as she had to admit having at least some prior knowledge on how to read definitely helped. A pencil still felt strange in her hand, but in the evenings after class she would sit at her desk and practice. Normally, she'd draw, as she felt it was a great stress reliever. It was kind of nice, and it took away some of the aches and pains she was constantly feeling in both her body and mind. Doug had helped her with her homework as best he could, though she had to admit, it did not really seem to be his thing, either.

His thing was painting and he was absolutely wonderful at it. Chell felt a little inferior next to him, as her drawings always turned out lopsided and ugly.

"You'll get better," he had told her. "Do not worry so much. Go with it. Imagine the pencil is a part of you, and let everything flow from your brain to the ends of your fingertips and ultimately, onto the paper. Concentrate on your thoughts and feelings into the connection, not into what your hands are doing—you will get it soon enough."

He had explained it in such an artistic way, she thought. Like a sort of energy that ran down your arm from your brain to your hand.

_ "Does it feel like a trial? Does it trouble your mind the way you trouble mine?"_

Chell had never experienced anything like that, except for perhaps with the portal gun. At the idea she had snorted in spite of herself, disgusted at the very notion that her only true _skill_ felt like – well, _that_.

_"Now you're thinking too fast…"_

The class she was attending had said basically the same thing as Doug had, that she'd get it soon enough. Chell was a fast learner, but she still felt childish in such a situation as school, inferior even though the class consisted of adults around her age. This feeling was especially prominent when she realized she couldn't even recite the alphabet. It was mortifying to admit, and as a result, she vowed to memorize the thing by the next morning. It had felt terrible to have to sit down and go through a book that contained nothing but letters in alphabetical order accompanied by large animated pictures. That was without counting the ever-present panic that fogged her brain whenever she came into contact with something Aperture-related. Those box-styled drawings resembled Aperture Science Safety and Information Symbols seen at the beginning of every Enrichment Center test, and then there was the pang she felt when she saw the bright red letter 'A' next to the picture of the 'apple'. _Wheatley._

_ "You're like marbles on glass…"_

It was always so hard when she was reminded of him. She was sort of grateful that Doug hardly mentioned him around her and she wasn't sure how to communicate this sort of thing with her counsellor, at least until she learned sign language. It left her kind of stuck in some limbo, where every few days or so she'd find something that jogged her memory of Wheatley and she'd become a wreck again.

_"Vilify…"_

She was past the stage of self-loathing in which she had been convinced she could have fixed things, and she didn't blame herself anymore for what had happened to them. She was angry, sure, but she accepted that there was nothing she could do about it. Even GLaDOS couldn't change the past.

_"Don't even try…"_

Thank goodness for that, she thought. If Aperture had found some way to meddle with the past, she probably wouldn't have made it this far and she'd _still_ be in that hell hole.

Yes, she'd certainly been to hell and back again, if Aperture counted as hell. Falling three thousand meters below the Earth's surface and ending up in an abandoned shaft flooded with toxic goo and radioactive waste seemed quite viable as far as hell went. If it wasn't one thing, it was always another, and so her constant paranoia wasn't overly surprising when everything was taken into account. Too bad her counsellor and peers didn't agree with her. If they had known, maybe then they'd understand, but Chell didn't have the means to tell them and it was rather difficult to explain.

'I escaped from an abandoned underground research facility filled with sentient robots that were set on killing me. I'm lucky that I ever got to see the light of day again. Oh, and I have no memory of how I got there in the first place.' Even inside her head it sounded stupid.

_"Vilify…"_

So, every time she left the comfort of her and Doug's apartment, she was constantly looking over her shoulder, her head turning every single direction trying to absorb all of the different, foreign stimuli. She just wasn't used to so many people, so many _things_ happening at once when she was so vulnerable—add that to the fact that she was positive that GLaDOS would find out where she was and come to take her _back_, and Chell thought she deserved credit for being able to cope at _all_.

She had wanted normality. But now that she had it, she wasn't sure she could handle it, which was where the counselling came in.

Phrases such as Post Traumatic Stress and Bipolar Disorder ran through her mind as she watched the distant waves flicker against the shoreline in the last few dregs of daylight. With a sigh she knew it could have been much worse—but it was still brain damage of a sort, wasn't it? The counsellors had suggested she take medication, telling her that the drugs would essentially _solve the problem, _just as Doug's medication managed his had a difficult time understanding this and she didn't trust it. If she was broken, she was broken, and there wasn't anything anybody could do about it.

_"Don't even try…"_

And now, seven months after her and Doug had acquired the small condo overlooking the sea in the busy old city, she stretched again, feeling her spine pop. She had been in a tired stupor and, breaking out of it, she yawned. The hard surface of the chair dug into her.

"Ch-chell?"

It was Doug, and she jumped, not noticing that he had been in the room with her. Evidently, he had been watching her for some time, and as she turned to face him she noticed he had a peculiar expression on his lined face.

"Did you hear me at all?"

She shook her head, not realizing that she was indeed _that_ tired. Had he really been speaking?

Doug didn't continue. He just watched her tiny form spin, still seated clumsily in the small chair. His eyes found hers and he hesitated.

"The song…"

Her mouth opened a fraction. There was something increasingly odd about the way he was looking at her. It was as if he was seeing her for the first time.

"I remember… something."

Chell let the music play between them, _"You've got sucker's luck…"_

What is it, she wanted to ask. She settled for a half-shrug instead, too tired to stand up and give him a comforting hug.

Suddenly, he asked her, "Would you like to dance?"

Chell froze, taken aback. _Dance? _She blinked once, twice. He- he wanted to _dance? _With _her?_

_ "Have you given up…"_

Chell had never danced before. It was one of those incomprehensible things she had seen other people do in this new world, but never once had the notion that she could do it herself entered her mind. Those people, they had made it look so easy, so _fluid_—but Chell never felt fluid anymore. She felt clumsy and unsure-footed and her equilibrium was continually upset by the absence of long fall boots even nigh a year later. How could she dance? She did not know how.

_"Does it feel like a trial…"_

She hardly noticed Doug moving toward her, barely feeling his warm hand grasp her own. The connection sent a small spark to her soul and numbly she could sense a long-forgotten, diminished sensation of _belonging _race through her_, _maybe even accompanied by something deeper. She stood up, and he placed his fragile hands on her hips.

"Like this."

He moved her ever so slowly, matching the melodic tune. He remained silent, and Chell let her eyes wander over their limited possessions, the peeling drawings, threadbare carpet with a cube tucked away in the corner. Outside, the first few raindrops were beginning to fall as the last vestiges of light left the sky.

_"Does it trouble your mind the way you trouble mine?"_

Chell did not know where he had learned to dance, nor did she care. All she knew was the ever-increasing sensation of _belonging _and the way itfilled every particle of her being like nothing else had ever done. The flow of the music, so dismal a few moments ago, was now beautiful. It struck a chord inside of her. She shuffled closer to Doug and bowed her head, letting her eyes fall closed. It was so rare these days that she should feel contented enough to not want her eyes open.

"It will be all right, Angel," he whispered in her ear. "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." His whiskery chin mussed the top of her hair.

The nickname had been used before. The first time had been right after she had finished scribbling down her story for him—he remained the only person alive who knew about all of her past experiences. She had told him about Aperture, about the testing and the Dual Portal Device, about Wheatley… and he had looked into her eyes, his full of tears, and had told her that he understood, that he knew how she felt. He had told her, in turn, his own story, about how he was broken, about how he had suffered. That night she had learned that their past had been entwined deeper than she could ever have imagined.

_"Does it feel like a trial…"_

A clap of thunder split through the quiet and Chell jumped about a mile, eyes wide. Doug jerked, too, his grip on her waist tightening as a blinding flash of lightning followed.

_"Does it trouble your mind the way you trouble mine…"_

Chell's heartbeat was hammering inside of her chest as she struggled to calm herself. _It is just a storm. It is just a storm. _But she couldn't shake the memory of the facility rocking beneath her feet with an impossibly loud, thundering _crash. _She couldn't rid herself of the images of the destruction that followed, the near-death experiences, the fact that she _shouldn't be alive, _and it was only a matter of time—

Doug pulled her closer to him, pressing his face into her shoulder. "Think about it not._ Think about it not. _Angel, we're safe. No, the journey is over," but Chell could tell that he was trying to convince himself of that fact just as much as he was trying to convince her.

_ "Does it feel like a trial? Did you fall for the same empty answers again?"_

There was another rumble of thunder, more distant this time, and Doug sank to his knees. His hold on her did not lessen and she was pulled to the floor, landing in a soft heap against a wall papered with drawings. She felt his breath tickle her ear as he whispered something incomprehensible, and she closed her eyes again as he wrapped his arms around her. _She was safe. It was over. _She could not believe this, in her heart. She hated the way she couldn't process the notion of freedom. In essence, she would _never _be free.

_"Vilify…"_

Doug pressed his forehead against hers, lifting his hand to cover their eyes. "Wait until it's over. Then look. When it's over nothing will be the same again, you'll see. Don't listen…"

And despite the medicine, despite endless counselling sessions—Chell knew that he would never be free, either. With his hand, Doug ran his thumb over her palm, his fingers intertwining with her own. He held her hand firmly, but she could feel minute trembles—from which of them they were originating, she did not know.

_"Don't even try. Vilify…"_

With the loudest rumble of all, a heavenly tremor so deep Chell felt it shake her very bones, the lights within the tiny room cut out and the radio fizzled into static. Darkness hit the pair in full force, and Doug's hand clamped down hard on Chell's wrists.

"Aaaah," he whimpered. They closed their eyes.

With the flash of lightning, the pictures papered above the two were briefly illuminated. A pattern of stars, complete with a lone moon shone down upon them, but as quickly as the light came, it was taken. The fake stars shone no more.

And afterward, Chell could not recall for how long she sat there in the dark with Doug, a hand on each other's wrist, barefoot. She heard him cry, heard him murmur indecipherable words, doubtlessly terrified of meeting _her _again_, _of seeing _that place_ in his broken mind_. _Chell wondered if freedom was a part of reality at all—what if freedom was just a story that their minds told themselves to cope? What if she would never truly leave Aperture?

But the truth came to her, at once, accompanied by another blinding flash and a deep peal of thunder—the underlying grammar of the world was as clear as the sky was dark, and there was a possibility of distinction between each—Aperture, and her new domain. The water that beat at the receding shorelines, the rain that lashed against the window was a part of something uncontrollable, as was she. It was a circle she couldn't run from, she couldn't hide, a pre-determined, programmed set of events—

_She was meant to survive._

At length, the storm ceased, as did the one raging inside her very soul. Doug lifted his heavy head from her shoulder and he helped her to her feet. She straightened the cuffs of his nightshirt and they walked to the window together, hand-in-hand. The clouds had cleared, the rain had stopped, and below, the motorway was quiet. The only light was from the moon high overhead, reflected as many thousand shimmering points of light shining from the rippling sea. The water was turbulent, unsettled, unable hold the smooth image it had held mere moments before the storm had come.

"The moon is distant from the sea," Doug said finally, his chin atop her head. Chell's eyes found the moon, and she pondered, for the umpteenth time, if _he _was up there, looking down onto earth and thinking the same things as she was. She knew, somehow, in her heart, that he was sorry.

"I wonder what it all means."

Silently, she agreed. Perhaps neither of them would ever know.

* * *

_Author's Note: _Doug's line 'There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so' is a Shakespeare quote, and 'The moon is distant from the sea' is an Emily Dickinson quote. Hope you guys liked it, and happy early Valentine's!


End file.
